"What I've kept - so far, so good - is my curiosity," the eternally gamine Agnès Varda told a packed audience at the French Institute in London last weekend, talking about the step away from the feature films with which she made her name (Cléo de 5 à 7, Le Bonheur, L'Une Chante L'Autre Pas) and towards the documentaries and installations that currently occupy her attention.

Now 78, the godmother of the New Wave has spent the autumn watching audiences musing over her offering at the Fondation Cartier in Paris. In the exhibition, called L'Ile et Elle, she showed a triple-screen film, Patatutopia, illustrating a fondness for misshapen potatoes first revealed a decade ago in The Gleaners and I; a partially animated meditation on the demise of her beloved cat; a cabin made of film strips from Les Créatures, her "total, total flop" of 1966, featuring Catherine Deneuve and Michel Piccoli; a playful piece involving seaside pin-up postcards; and a series of interviews with the widows of fisherman on the island of Noirmoutiers, near Nantes, where the film-maker maintains the home she set up with her husband Jacques Demy, the director of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, who died of leukaemia in 1990.

In London, she also introduced a set of three filmed essays linked under the title Cinévardaphoto, representing almost the entire half-century span of a career that began when she abandoned a job as the official photographer of the Théâtre Nationale Populaire to make her first feature film, La Pointe Courte, in 1954.

It was a photograph she took that same year which provides the material for Ulysse, a 22-minute film made in 1982. The photo shows a naked man, a naked boy and a dead goat, carefully arranged on a pebble beach, their relationships opaque. Almost 30 years later, she revisits the man (a former art director of Elle) and the boy (a neighbour) in an attempt to discover what, if anything, the picture meant to them. Others, including schoolchildren, are also interrogated in an attempt to uncover the possible meanings of the image.

In 1962, Varda was in Cuba, with only a still camera to record her impressions of the revolution. Lively editing of her black and white shots makes the 30-minute Salut Les Cubains a vigorous testimony to the optimism of the time and place, perfectly expressed in a lyrical montage devoted to a sugarcane-cutter. Bursting with music, the film also includes a wonderful sequence featuring Benny Moré, the great Cuban singer and bandleader, who died before the film was completed. "Socialism and cha-cha-cha is more fun than socialism with Russian melodies - that's the way I felt at the time," Varda said, a little superfluously.

The most recent of the three films is Ydessa, The Bears and Etc, a 45-minute study of the Toronto art collector Ydessa Hendeles, whose hoard of pre-war photographs of people with their teddy bears - not just children but soldiers, football teams and cheesecake models - occupied two rooms of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, creating an atmosphere of innocence unexpectedly violated by the presence in a third, otherwise bare chamber of Maurizio Cattelan's figure of a kneeling Adolf Hitler, his eyes raised as if to an unseen deity.

Hendeles being the child of Holocaust survivors, and Munich being Munich, the emotional impact is considerable. Varda, who originally planned to become a museum curator, creates a sympathetic portrait of a collector achieving an ambition to "live like an artist". Which, as Varda's own life demonstrates, is not something susceptible to a single definition.